Language Log

President Trump meets with the Vice Premier of China, Liu He, in the White House:

We haven't written about tattoo fiascos for awhile.  Here's a humdinger on Ariana Grande's left palm, in Japanese:

Sign at the high-end Chinese hotpot chain Haidilao:

There's a new attitude wave in China, and it's called the "Fó xì xiànxiàng 佛系现象", which looks like it means "Buddha system / series / department phenomenon".  Unfortunately, that doesn't really make much sense on its own account, and it certainly doesn't fit with the way the expression "Fó xì 佛系" is employed in current parlance, as described in this Chinese newspaper account.  The closest parallel I can think of in American contemporary speech would be “whate-e-e-ver".

So why are they taking the name of the Buddha in vain?

Two images of Chinese takeaway packages in Beijing from Teresa Norman:

The title of a post at MedPage Today echoes the widely negative reaction to obviously blown calls in the recent NFL conference title games — "Is Journal Peer-Review Now Just a Game? Milton Packer wonders if the time has come for instant replay":

Many believe that there is something sacred about the process by which manuscripts undergo peer-review by journals. A rigorous study described in a thoughtful paper is sent out to leading experts, who read it carefully and provide unbiased feedback. The process is conducted with honor and in a timely manner.

It sounds nice, but most of the time, it does not happen that way.

For some comments about the process from the perspective of editors, reviewers, and authors, see the rest of Packer's post. His experience is in the biomedical field, but the situation is similar in other fields. Amazingly bad stuff is often published in respectable and even eminent journals, and genuinely insightful work can be delayed for years by painfully slow interactions with inattentive and dubiously competent reviewers.

How many redundant letters are there in the English Alphabet? What would be the ideal of a perfect alphabet, and how far does the English Alphabet fall short of that ideal?

— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) January 30, 2019

[h/t Stan Carey]

Wikipedia on Arturs Krišjānis Kariņš:

Arturs Krišjānis Kariņš (born December 13, 1964) is a Latvian politician[1], current Prime Minister of Latvia and former Member of the European Parliament.

Kariņš was born in Wilmington, Delaware, United States to a Latvian American family. In 1996, he finished a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. […]

He was Unity's candidate for the Latvian premiership at the 2018 election. On 7 January 2019, he was tasked by the Latvian president with forming the next government. He took office as prime minister on 23 January 2019, leading a centre-right coalition of five conservative and liberal parties (KPV LV, JKP, AP, NA and Unity).

Query from a journalist:

I'm working on a piece on superb owls, which become popular around this time of year because of the Superbowl. Do you happen to know if there's a name for this phenomenon of splitting a word in a different-than-intended way to change its meaning? Have you come across other examples of this?

I come up empty (except for the examples in "Letters Witch"), but I bet commenters can provide other examples and suitable terminology.

More than a dozen times over the past couple of weeks, someone using the username "Ronaldmew" has been locked out of our site by Wordfence due to repeated attempts to log in as a contributor. Each time, the IP address that the multiple attempts came from is blocked, and then a day or two later Ronaldmew tries again from a different IP address.

The last few attempts have been from SecuredConnectivity.net in New York City, Eweka Internet Services  in the Netherlands, Strong Technology LLC in Melbourne Australia, and OverPlay.Net LP in Swindon UK.

None of the 180,535 registered comments on this site have been entered by "Ronaldmew", so a desire to communicate with our readers doesn't seem to be their goal.

Ronaldmew, whoever you are, this is not working. I'm going to leave the comments open on this post for a while, and maybe you can explain what you're trying to do and why you're trying to do it this way.

Update — no comment from Ronaldmew, but four more blocked login attempts using that name since this post went up.

From the Washington Post:

The study is a corpus analysis performed by Jesse Egbert, a corpus linguist at Northern Arizona University and Clark Cunningham, a law professor who did work in law and linguistics from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s (link, link, link, link), including co-authoring an article with Chuck Fillmore that was what really opened my eyes to the power of linguistics in analyzing issues of word meaning.

Over the years, we've discussed the fact that "filled pauses" (um and uh in American English) sometimes have communicative force beyond their role in filling compositional silences — see e.g. "And uh — then what?", 1/5/2004, and "Uh", 10/12/2016. There's a nice example in a recent headline at TPM: "Um, Tapes?", 1/21/2019. In the article under the headline, Josh Marshall remarks on a striking passage in Rudy Guliani's New Yorker interview:

RG:But I can tell you, from the moment I read the story, I knew the story was false.

NYR: Because?

RG: Because I have been through all the tapes, I have been through all the texts, I have been through all the e-mails, and I knew none existed. And then, basically, when the special counsel said that, just in case there are any others I might not know about, they probably went through others and found the same thing.

NYR: Wait, what tapes have you gone through?